Kevin Beal

Haha. Why am I not surprised she's teaching that? And for almost double what I make as a full time programmer. The insanity! It's too funny to be upset about.

This is an interesting twist on the evil demon thought experiment, except that instead of seeing a world which is not there, the world itself can be manipulated into any form the deity wishes. It presents the same problem as the original, though, which is interesting because this is literally what monotheistic religions allow for when they say that their god is all powerful. I'm eager to try it out on a xtian to see how it goes over. Will they be okay with it? Will they protest with "but god wouldn't do that!"? Certainly it presents a problem for the xtian worldview. But then again, they could always just go existential nihilist on us, like Descartes did and then we'd all be in the same position. Oh yea, and I couldn't find anything in google for "iro". What does that mean?

There are several that I'm aware of – some very honorable people AFAIK. It would be very interesting to hear theirs and your perspective on confronting the reality of single motherhood, the increased stress, the reduced quality time, diminished authority (sometimes), alienation of affection issues, fewer resources, etc. My own single mother was very happy to receive government handouts, and she was actually happy not to be on the hook for having authority in the relationship because she would be responsible for maintaining it, which she was too tired to do after working 3 jobs. She wasn't too keen on spending time with us anyway so the reduced quality time wasn't too bad, and the alienation of affection stuff didn't seem to bother her since she had much more control over the narrative (as compared to my father). It would be a source of great pleasure to break the associations I have with single mothers by hearing about more responsible ways that single mothers handle these types of issues. Hopefully the just indignation expressed by our friends here on the boards doesn't intimidate. Learning ways of dealing with the problems surrounding single motherhood after the fact is of great value, and if you (or others) have perspectives which could help, it would be a shame if you did not share them. (There are lots of people reading this with all different backgrounds and problems they face that you could potentially help).

A simulation cannot directly produce mental states; it could only do it indirectly by presenting you with scary images (for example). Mental states (thoughts, feelings, desires, etc) are presented, not represented. You can then argue that we exist somewhere else and are hooked up to the matrix, but then we still exist somewhere else, which is a different argument than "the universe is a simulation". If the universe is a shorthand for saying "the entirety of existing entities" (synonymous with "reality"), then this is categorically false. A simulation describes a relationship – it is a simulation of a thing. It's like when people say that god created existence. That logically makes god something other than existing (non-existent). If god exists (which is false), then existence must already be a thing prior to him doing whatever is described as "created existence". Likewise, something other than the simulation must also exist – some entity(ies) to simulate. If you say that what is being simulated is god (as the universe) as you described, then you define god as existence. First existence created existence is categorically false, but also, I'm not sure what that explains, if anything. People define god as love, so the existence of love proves the existence of god; it's tautological. If god is existence, and existence exists, then god's existence is proven. But all it is is a definition; there is no logic there. So, even if the observable universe were a simulation of something else, none of that can logically support the existence of a god.

That's really funny. I had almost exactly the same idea when I read the book, except that instead of it being a website, it was the new tab page in the browser, and it would include quotes that might be related to that week's stems. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to contribute with my other commitments, but it's definitely something I would use. (I do sentence completions every weekday morning). I hope it works out

No, but I certainly recommend anything on that list, as well I just meant anything in the first 1200 podcasts or so. The show has grown a lot and gotten better in some ways, but I started from the beginning of the podcast series (Stef used to tease people for not doing that) and there used to be a different kind of focus on self knowledge topics. There are some real gems from recent call-in shows, but it was a pretty constant topic for stand alone shows for quite a while, and they had a big impact on me. FDR678 Everything You Do Is... http://media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_678_Everything_You_Do_Is.mp3 This one is easily in the top 5 for me. It offers a perspective from which it was easier to trust myself. FDR1243 The Meaning of Life Part 1 - Meaninglessness http://media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_1243_Meaning_of_Life_Part_1.mp3 FDR1244 The Meaning of Life Part 2 - Identity as Heroin http://media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_1244_Meaning_of_Life_Part_2.mp3 FDR1245 The Meaning of Life Part 3 - Integrity as Salvation http://media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_1245_Meaning_of_Life_Part_3.mp3 These were fantastic for getting me to see a lot more clearly what integrity is and how to achieve it. FDR70 How to control a human soul http://media.freedomainradio.com/feed/how_to_control_a_human_soul.mp3 Some listeners used to joke that this was the best podcast and that everything has failed to reach this same height again. It is very good and should definitely count as a classic. It's great for seeing more clearly how traumatic being manipulated as a child can be – the logic of it. I could make recommendations until the cows came home, so feel free to ask anytime

Divorce is increasingly seen to be as trivial as a breakup, most likely because, as far as the woman is concerned, the consequences are basically the same. She can easily replace her dependence on the man with the state, she might not even have to move out when property is often unfairly distributed. So many people already have kids outside of marriage, and nobody argues with women anymore that they ought to stay; it's just assumed that she must be doing it for a good reason (e.g. "she must be very unhappy if she's getting a divorce, poor thing", poor husband too? Poor kids?! Nope). Whatever negative consequences are there, they disproportionately affect men and children, and since children's preferences don't matter to most people, and because both men and women are highly biased toward women's interests, people don't generally have any awareness of those issues (until they become a victim themselves and haven't completely been consumed by the abyss of gynocentric familial propaganda). There is some evidence to suggest that parents living in a significantly unhappy marriage (where antagonism is the norm) will harm the development of children more than divorce does. Having experienced the effects of divorce myself and witnessed it as it affected the age groups of my many siblings, it's not a trivial matter in the slightest. Not that all of this was the divorce, but there were suicide attempts, lots and lots of abuse of drugs and alcohol, chronic and severe depressions, and more. This is relying on anecdotal evidence, but these problems didn't exist in my family before the divorce. So, for an unhappy marriage to be worse than that, it has to be really bad. Are 50% of married couples with children really so bad that this would be an improvement? If so, then I may well lose all faith in humanity. My case was made worse by the way the divorce took place, too (very ugly). So, obviously, this isn't super scientific or anything.

Here's the actual abstract (4418 participants): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811915007697 (You have to pay $35 for the actual paper, and I didn't feel like it) The article falsely claims that no studies showing a difference account for age that show a difference in percentage of white matter. I found one here within seconds (80 participants). There may be more that do, but I'm feeling lazy. Basically, the argument is that the male hippocampus is larger, but it's proportional to the size of the brain overall. The author, however, is being misleading by framing the debate as being about hippocampus size, which it's not. That's just one claim among many about brain differences. For instance, male brains are larger, even after accounting for relative body size, which the study even supports. I don't know very much about neuroscience, but the headlines on wired and everywhere pushing this meta-analysis all seem to make the same claim: that differences don't really exist between male and female brains, and unless the full study addresses the other claimed differences, it seems premature at the very least.

If he's going through a divorce, then he's probably thinking a lot about how he could have been wrong about something he was so sure about, feeling disillusioned and trying to make sense of things. Getting a good philosophical grounding for his perspective on life would clearly be beneficial, but it's pretty abstract and more of a curiosity until you realize it's significance. That doesn't happen right away. What I would suggest is you sharing a struggle that you've had with discovering yourself and what's important about life and what helped you gain the clarity you needed to become motivated and clear on what you have to do. What podcast had a profound impact on you and why? Why is it important to you? How did it help you become more of who you really are? Share that with him. Start a conversation that goes on for months. Something he'll remember for a long time. How empowering is that?! Random recommendations are for nerds

Thank you I think you're right, and it helped clarify for me an idea I've been mulling over in my head ever since I listened to Stef's Meaning of life series (especially FDR1244). In it he says something to the effect of "identity is the opposite of integrity". He talks about it in a wider context, but where there is the ego thwarting simple honesty, it makes it clear how "having an identity" can be a problem. I highly recommend the series

Hi Colby! I can certainly relate to not being able to get enough. If you're interested, I've got some favorites from the "classics series" (as I call it); podcasts that had a big impact on me. Does that mean you are religious and are examining atheism? I've never been religious. How's that process going?

Heya Robert! What interested you about the show? I've known more than a few people who ran away screaming Haha.

Hi Matt! In your experience, why do you think that so many people don't listen to reason?

That was very refreshing. Thank you. It was way more satisfying than hearing what Wittgenstein or Derrida or Kant have concluded about stuff. I'm honestly not looking for reasons to dismiss you. My previous comment was not meant as a criticism of your position or whatever. I don't feel at any threat of becoming disillusioned or any of the other psychological motives you've got me pegged for.

Hey man. You're the one who's always qualifying your statements with "in a relevant sense", as if, when you don't say it, you might mean that what you're saying is true in a sense which is irrelevant. I had to make sure I don't have a belief system. If I did, then yes, please threaten it!

Wait wait wait. Do you mean that in a relevant sense, or an irrelevant sense?

I'm very sorry that's something you had to do. I made the same decision myself several 5 years ago. I absolutely needed therapy to get me through that time, while I reexamined everything. Even though they are physically distant, they are still in your head, as you know. It may have been easier for me than most since there was already a ton of distance and I was encouraged as a teen to separate from my father, and brother to a lesser extent. But I don't know anyone who found it easy to defoo. I know it wasn't easy for me. Mad respect for working on getting clarity and reclaiming your own mind. It's not easy work. Feel free to share more. I know that it can be pretty disappointing trying to talk about this stuff with most people, but there are a lot of people here who would be able to relate, and others who may even have practical advice. But if you don't want to, I can totally understand and appreciate that too. Take care

Actually automation creates more jobs, not fewer. I know that sounds weird, but it's true. The number of specialized people who are needed to create these robots is not insignificant, but obviously, it has to be cheaper than without the robot or else why would anyone create them. The first reason is the excess wealth created by replacing human labor is used to hire more people to do other things that haven't or can't be automated. The second reason is that the cost of the goods being produced through automation go down and those savings are passed onto the consumer, who now has more wealth to either spend on other goods / services or even hire more people themselves. If they spend it on other goods / services, then the people selling it respond to increased consumer demand by hiring more people. It's one of the economic fallacies Henry Hazlitt talks about in Economics in One Lesson. Also, it's mistaken to believe that machines can replace any low IQ job and do it better. There are many tasks that machines epicly fail at that take almost no effort on the part of humans. Amazon's Mechanical Turk program exists because certain things cannot easily be automated. Of course, if you create a machine with true strong artificial intelligence, then it could potentially replace any human job, but then we're talking about a whole different class of machine that we don't even know can exist. But if most people didn't have to work, I bet one effect would be that people focus to an even greater degree on their appearances, kinda like the birds of paradise who have no real predators, so they evolved more and more elaborate ways of wooing their mates until they are just like this kaleidoscopic technicolor dreamcoat bird whose skills all revolve around finding mates and not being productive in other ways. Families would benefit from having two stay at home parents, though. But a certain amount of stress is actually good for you, so maybe people would just get lazy..?

I remember Mike saying something about trying unsuccessfully; like he doesn't use computers or something.

Hi knmcreate. Congratulations! Welcome to the boards When you say "internalization to sort out", do you mean those sorts of automatic beliefs that aren't necessarily your own that serve someone else's agenda? I found therapy to be enormously helpful for that. I also have a couple of classic podcast recommendations that I'm eager to share with anyone who may not have heard them yet! The first is: FDR349 You Are Not Broken http://www.fdrpodcasts.com/#/349/you-are-not-broken http://media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_349_You_Are_Not_Broken.mp3 I found this great in that it helped me have more compassion for myself, not feel so fatalistic and better understand why I became who I became. The second is: FDR678 Everything You Do Is... http://www.fdrpodcasts.com/#/678/everything-you-do-is-video-available http://media.freedomainradio.com/feed/FDR_678_Everything_You_Do_Is.mp3 This is similar to the first, but made me more curious about the wisdom I already have inside me, and to understand better that I do things for a reason.

The non-fiction ones are on YouTube. UPB: On Truth: ...and I'm feeling too lazy to look up the other ones. They're on the main FDR channel, so they should be easy to find.

If you don't talk to me like I'm 10 years old, I'm not going to understand what you're trying to communicate. I've given you a bunch of crap already for not speaking simply in the other thread. Speak simply, for the love of god.

There's a psychological phenomenon where the feelings one person denies that they themselves are experiencing, end up being provoked in the other person. Imagine that you are talking to someone who's irritated or resentful but pretending to be happy, they are going to inevitably send you mixed signals, or say passive aggressive things, veiled insults, etc. And that's going to make you feel irritated. Or imagine that someone is really anxious, but pretends to themselves that they aren't anxious. Those mixed signals will start be confusing; you'll wonder what's missing and you'll start to feel anxious, unsure of what's going on. Being told that taxation is theft is difficult, not because it's difficult to process logically, but because the implications around never being told something so obvious are very uncomfortable. How many people have colluded in this theft and their blindness to it? How many people have they rationalized evil to? I think that most people just think unconsciously: this makes me feel really bad -> the conclusion is bad -> therefore he's wrong. And so, they deny their own anxiety and self doubt and it infects the people they're talking to. Maybe that self doubt you feel is not even your own?

By that I mean that I make it explicit how the analogy fits what is being talked about. Here's an example analogy: "When you say that we need the state to protect your property, that's like saying that we need to pay the mafia in order to protect us" I would be making the analogy explicit by saying exactly how the state is like the mafia: it's an involuntary relationship where they steal from you while telling you that they are protecting you from things like loss of property. Taxes are like the mafia's "protection" racket. So, if they accept that it's absurd when the mafia does it, and the analogy fits closely enough for them to see it works the same in both instances, then that should be cause for them to really consider that we don't need the state to protect our property, and further, doing so is as absurd as relying on the mafia for protection. That is, if they have any integrity they will really consider it.

I don't know if this is actually a good thing to do, but I break down the analogy and say "X is to A, as Y is to B". The more I explain it as if they are 10 years old and they get increasingly uncomfortable, the more certain I am that I did enough and they are just being defensive. That way, I don't get caught thinking to myself later "if I had only argued it better, then maybe they would have understood". If they are experiencing cognitive dissonance like Alan said (which would explain the lack of effort to comprehend) then there may not be anything you could do to move the conversation forward. With ideas that challenge people's worldviews, a person who puts in no effort to understand just simply won't (in my experience). I think to just assume that the analogy is you changing the subject entirely, instead of assuming that you must be saying it for a reason and trying to figure out what that reason is, is them not putting any effort in.